Chapter XIII: The Marne to Mons (2)

_A British double O.P. between Bethune and La Bassée. The buildings which once concealed it lie round it in a heap, but the towers have still some substance._]

MERVILLE.

_The farthest west point reached in the Lys Salient during the German advance in April, 1918. The town was practically destroyed by our shell-fire during the German occupation._]

ESTAIRES.

_Like Merville, which lies four miles west of it, Estaires was terribly damaged by our shelling during its occupation by the Germans from April to August, 1918._]

BAILLEUL.

_Not to be confused with the village of the same name north of Arras, close to the Vimy Ridge. It was thoroughly ruined by the fighting in both directions during 1918._]

ARMENTIÈRES.

_In 1919 very little had been done by way of reconstruction in Armentières, but a year later the western half of the town had been largely rebuilt, although the other half was still in the condition shown in the photograph._]

KEMMEL HILL.

_This photograph was taken from a distance of three miles, from which, however, the hill looks hardly as bold as it does from the higher part of the Menin Road. Its summit is about 350 feet higher than Ypres, which it entirely commands._]

KEMMEL HILL.

_The upper part of the hill itself, which was once largely covered with trees of which only the stems remain. It was captured, after an heroic French defence, in April, 1918, and held until the final retreat of the Germans began four months afterwards._]

"PLUG STREET" WOOD.

_Ploegsteert will probably be "Plug Street" for all time in this country. Many trees are still standing in the wood. The turning to the left is the road to Messines._]

A CEMETERY AT "PLUG STREET."

_A Royal Berks Military Cemetery at the north-east corner of "Plug Street" Wood._]

BETHUNE.

_The lighter-coloured masonry halfway up the fine old tower shows where houses were standing built closely round it. Their debris has been entirely cleared away and the Grande Place is as tidy as it is, unhappily, empty._]

V.--BETHUNE, LA BASSÉE, AND LOOS

(PLATES 35 TO 42.)

The pleasant little town of Bethune, with its friendly, Scotch-like name, lies just beyond the coal district, a dozen miles north-west of Lens and seven miles west of La Bassée. Our front lines during most of the war crossed the Bethune-La Bassée road about the line of Festubert and Givenchy, two and a half miles short of La Bassée. Although so near the German lines, it was not seriously shelled until the attempted German advance in March and April, 1918, when in two months the whole centre of the town was reduced to ruins. Colonel Gill, taking me through it a few months later, had some difficulty even in recognising "Bond Street," which for years had been a tolerably safe place for buying tobacco, or visiting a barber, or taking lunch, or meeting friends. We walked over 2 feet of brick débris along what must have been the roadway. The outlying parts of the town are comparatively little damaged. The fourteenth-century belfry tower (Plate 35) was closely encircled by houses, built up against it, which have altogether disappeared, and the tower itself shows hideous cracks over practically its whole height. The Church of St. Vaast is so completely destroyed that one can only tell one end from the other by the orientation of its site.

In the great German attack of April, 1918, the town was saved by the Lancashires when the Portuguese had failed us near Neuve Chapelle, and when we were compelled to give way from Armentières to Merville, a few miles farther north. The same troops ("second-rate troops" the Germans called them) held Givenchy, on the La Bassée Canal. The village has entirely disappeared. Plate 36 was taken from a mound on which I believe that the church once stood (but there were not even stones visible on the surface to mark the place), looking back over the British lines. Lord Haig[18] tells how two batteries each left a gun within 500 yards of the draw-bridge at Givenchy, and, assisted by a party of gunners who held the bridge with rifles, succeeded in stopping the German advance at this most critical time.

[18] Despatches, p. 226.

The country between Bethune and La Bassée and northwards and southwards for miles from that line, was in 1919 a desert, bare of trees, of houses, of crops, of people, growing nothing but shell craters and barbed wire, with thousands of tons of buried broken shells likely to be very offensive to agricultural implements! The seven miles of road between the two towns runs eastward through the desolation, never very far south of the canal, and at Cuinchy close to the brickfields and the "railway triangle," the scene of specially hard fighting in 1915. The triangle again defeated our attack in September, 1916.

The little town of La Bassée (Plate 37), the name of which was for long so familiar to us, is, of course, a heap of ruins. I remember a statement in a German paper in 1914 to the effect that, La Bassée and the canal (Plate 38, which shows a reconstructed bridge) being in their hands, their final success was quite assured! The eight miles of road from La Bassée to Lens passes Hulloch and Loos and Hill 70, and enters Lens by the Cité St. Laurent, a suburb which was in our hands long before we were in the town itself. The road from Bethune to Lens passes between Loos and the "Double Crassier." The ruined pithead (Plate 39) near Hulloch is only an example of the condition to which the Germans reduced all the colliery workings in the district on which they could lay hands.

The story of the great fights at Loos is full of splendid episodes, although the results of the fighting were very much less than had been hoped for. In April, 1915, the German front lay from a point west of Loos and Lens southward nearly as far as Arras, covering the colliery villages and the Lorette and Vimy Ridges. It was first broken by the great attack in 1915, which gave the French all the Lorette Ridge except its extreme east end. Opposite Loos, across the Lens-Béthune road, lay the twin slag heaps known as the Double Crassier (Plate 40), where for many months the opposing front trenches were literally within a few yards of each other, the Germans holding the slag heaps. There are stories of mutual courtesies and jocularity between Saxons and our own men under these conditions, which came to an end (from the German side) when Prussians replaced Saxons. But if the trenches had been in our Midlands, with Yorkshire laid waste beyond them, instead of in a foreign country, probably our boys would have felt differently. We did not hear of, or expect to hear of, any similar friendliness where the French poilus were concerned. Farther north came the strongly fortified "Fosse No. 8" and the Hohenzollern Redoubt close to Haisnes, and just short of the canal at Givenchy. What we got to know as the Loos battle began on the 25th of September, 1915. The Double Crassier was taken at once. A man in the London Irish is said to have kicked off a football from the parapet in this attack and dribbled it across No Man's Land to the German first lines.[19] The Hohenzollern Redoubt was penetrated, the Highlanders got to the northern suburbs of Lens, and the front line passed to the east of the Lens-La Bassée road. But further progress became impossible, and early in October our front line was for the time "stabilised" west of the road. The great redoubt still remained practically in German hands. In this fighting the 47th Division London Territorials took part, the first complete Cockney division to take the field.

[19] Buchan, vol. x., p. 174.

GIVENCHY.

_The British positions at Givenchy, north of the La Bassée Canal, looking back from the site of the village. The holding of these positions in April, 1918, prevented Ludendorff's final attack from reaching Bethune._]

LA BASSÉE.

_The ruined village as it was left, when the roadways were cleared, after the evacuation by the Germans in their retreat in 1918._]

THE LA BASSÉE CANAL.

_The temporary lifting bridge over the canal at La Bassée. The buildings are, of course, reconstruction. The German newspapers proclaimed that the capture of the canal here, in 1915, made the result of the war quite certain!_]

A PITHEAD.

_Pithead work near Hulloch--a fair example of the state to which all pit works in the district were reduced before the Germans left._]

Of the Loos episodes there will not be forgotten that which got Piper Laidlaw, of the 7th K.O.S.B., his V.C., for marching up and down on the parapet (close to the Cité St. Laurent, a suburb of Lens) with his pipes until all the men were out of the trenches, and carrying on until he was himself wounded. Nor will it be easily forgotten how Mdlle. Moreau, the daughter of a miner, devoted herself, during the first German occupation, to saving and nursing British wounded soldiers, or how later on, when we arrived there, she met our entering troops and, obtaining a rifle, was able to shoot sundry German soldiers who were attacking wounded men. She lost father and brother during the war. One is glad to know that she was awarded the Croix de Guerre, and that some of the soldiers, to whose welfare she was so devoted, regardless of her own safety, have bought land at Bethune and built a little house on it where she can carry on business, which one hopes will be most successful.

The zigzag communication trench, which will be familiar to many of our soldiers (Plate 41), forms a bit of roadside scenery typical of the country here over which the fighting went on in 1915 and for long afterwards. Loos itself was afterwards handed over to the French, who were not, unfortunately, able to retain it. Just beyond Loos, after it had been regained in 1918, I was stumbling over a bit of ground covered with all sorts of débris beside what had been lately German trenches, and which was even then being occasionally enviously shelled, when I saw growing in a crevice below the brick rubbish a garden pansy. I was, no doubt, walking over some cottager's garden, but garden and cottage were all now the same and all equally unrecognisable. The bright little flower, blowing uninjured at the bottom of its rubbish heap, seemed a pleasant emblem of the freeing and recovery of France which was just then coming so near.

Near to my discovery of the heartsease I found some of Colonel Gill's men in charge of a height-finder. They had comfortable enough quarters in a German dugout in which I found, and secured as a prize, a little booklet left behind by its late occupants. It is entitled "Wer da?" ("Who goes there?"), and contains a dozen chapters of a very pious and didactic kind on the duties of a soldier, his oath, his honour, his religion, and so on. The chapter on "Der Kriegsherr und der Eid" is rather pathetic in view of subsequent events. Here is a paragraph from it:

"It is thoroughly _altergermanisch_ and entirely in correspondence with the character of the German people to follow a King, who represents the might of God in earthly things ... who is a father to his country and a guide and war-lord to his soldiers. Between this prince and the soldiers there exists the most special and intimate relationship. He is the head and the heart of the Army; it is his shield and his sword. It protects his rights and his sacred person. He cares for it and shares its troubles and dangers."

What a cynical comment on this sort of stuff that the precious Kriegsherr ran away from his country and his beloved army a few weeks later! Then, again:

"We speak of '_deutscher Treue_.' It is a national heirloom handed down to us from our ancestors.... It shows itself through unbreakable adherence to the oath the soldier has made to his Fürsten und Kriegsherrn!"

Presumably this particular oath did not belong to the category of scraps of paper. Ninety-eight pages out of the hundred of which the book consists are devoted to this sort of statement and exhortation. But it is only fair to the reverend author to mention that, on the last two pages, under the heading "_Im Krieg_," he enjoins consideration, as a matter of "_Christliche Liebe_," for the people of the conquered countries, ending by an emphatic warning that the soldiers should think what would happen to their homes if the enemy were not imbued with the same Christian spirit! Unfortunately, this not very exalted motive for decent behaviour did not prove itself sufficiently vigorous to have any effect on the people whose parsons had gloried in the "merriness of war" four years earlier, when they thought that the fighting would be over and their own side victorious in a couple of months.

When one passes beside or over miles of No Man's Land, such as looks picturesque enough in Plate 42, one has to remember that one is not seeing a miniature landscape of chalk hills, such as would delight any youngster on Hampstead Heath, but seeing, perhaps, a garden, perhaps a cottage home, an orchard, a piece of green meadow, turned into ruin by the Huns. Surely the ghosts of these inanimate things must haunt, with the ghosts of thousands of innocent men, the people who turned their neighbour's country, animate and inanimate, from a joyful and living reality into wilderness and a graveyard!

THE DOUBLE CRASSIER.

_In front of the two long spoil heaps which went by this name the opposing trenches were for a long time within a few yards of each other. The Double Crassier was taken by us in the Loos battle of September, 1915._]

A COMMUNICATION TRENCH.

_A British Communication Trench near Loos. The rising ground in the distance is a part of the Lorette Ridge._]

"NO MAN'S LAND."

_Between Hulloch and Lens, a fair example of the destroyed pasture land where the churned-up chalk was too near the surface for the growth of the weedy vegetation such as appears in Plates XVII and XVIII._]

ARRAS.

_The central part of Arras seen from a height. The photograph shows what a town looks like even when it is, compared to others, not very badly destroyed!_]

VI.--ARRAS, VIMY, AND LENS

(PLATES 43 TO 50.)

Arras was in the possession of the Germans for three days in September, 1914, but they evacuated it in their retreat after the first battle of the Marne. It was only by very plucky fighting, however, that the French were able to keep them even a mile or two away, and for a long time they remained at St. Laurent-Blangy, which is practically in the north-eastern suburbs of the town. In October, 1914, therefore, they were only a couple of miles away, and from this short distance the centre of the city was bombarded severely by heavy artillery. The beautiful Hôtel de Ville and the belfry were destroyed, and the centre of the city generally much injured, as the view from above (Plate 43, an official photograph) shows very painfully. In April, 1916, the British being then in this zone, Arras was practically "cleared," the enemy being forced backwards for six miles. In the offensive of March, 1918, the Germans succeeded in getting two miles closer in on the south, but to the north the 1916 positions were held, and the enemy was finally driven twelve miles away towards Cambrai in our August offensive in 1918.

Outside the centre of the city the damage did not appear--when I first visited it while it was still under occasional long-range shell-fire--to be nearly so great as in the centre. Many houses were standing and at least more or less habitable, if windowless, and a few poor shops in the outskirts had started business. But published statistics indicate that more than half the houses are damaged beyond possibility of reconstruction. The cathedral, which is altogether in ruins (Plate 44), is an eighteenth-century basilica, and is happily not one of the glories of France. Some of the columns of the main arcade, standing by themselves with a piece of architrave still remaining in place, reminded one a little of the two beautiful Roman columns still standing on the stage of the theatre at Arles. A notice stood beside the ruins in 1918--I think it is still there--to the effect that it was intended to leave them unrestored to form an enduring reminder of the Huns. I hope it is not disrespectful for a great lover of French Gothic architecture to say that probably this particular building may really be more impressive in its ruined condition than it can ever have been when it was standing.

It was really remarkable to find in 1919 that the half-ruined town was already full of people going to and from the station, and obviously doing their best to carry on in spite of the surrounding conditions. We lunched at an hotel showing very many signs of dilapidation, but obviously serving a very considerable number of customers--quite a cheering sight.

I am not likely soon to forget a drive from Cambrai to Arras, on a very dark night, by by-roads which our Engineers had not yet visited, and while traffic regulations still prohibited even the very feeble illumination which could be obtained from an official headlamp. But the discomfort was much mitigated by the pleasure of watching a fine display of miscellaneous coloured fires to the south of our line, due to the discovery by our Tommies that the Germans had left large stores of signal lights behind in their retreat!

On from Arras to Cambrai runs the road which is the continuation of the Cambrai-Le Cateau road. It goes straight and level over fine rolling uplands like a Scotch moor, but with grass and herbage instead of heather, and (in 1918) with endless craters, trenches, and entanglements, and no hills in sight except the ridges away to the north left far behind.

The Vimy Ridge (Plate 45) rises at Bailleul, five miles north-east of Arras, and continues in a north-westerly direction for about the same distance to Givenchy.[20] It is steep on its eastern side and gently sloping on the western, and the highest part of the ridge is about 200 feet above the lower land to the east. The height is not great, but is amply sufficient to give the forces occupying it complete observation over the surrounding country in all directions. I was on it first on a brilliant afternoon in 1918, when the Germans were still trying to make a stand a little east of Lens. Away somewhere in the direction of Douai a great explosion was followed by a column of white smoke, brilliant in the sunshine, and spreading out into a huge white flower 3,000 feet above the ground--clearly a huge German "dump" blown up to prevent it falling into our hands. Below us a battery of field-guns was pounding away at the German lines, still only two or three miles beyond them. A German 'plane came in sight, engaged in the singularly futile business of dropping "propaganda" literature from a height which kept it out of the reach of 13-pounders. From away over Lens, where under a dark cloud the Germans were still trying, in despair, to avoid their Nemesis, came the dull noise of the fighting. Behind the ridge lay the shell-marked slopes up which the Canadians rushed in April, 1917, and from which afterwards even the wild German push of a year later failed to move us. In the distance behind the ridge towards the west stood the tower of Mont St. Eloi, battered about in fighting from the fifteenth century to the nineteenth; and having now again seen the Prussians on the soil of its country, and surely rejoicing--even as inanimate masonry--when at last "der Tag" had arrived, and the land had become once more its own, with peace and victory not far away.

[20] Not to be confused with the Bailleul near Armentières, or the Givenchy north of the La Bassée Canal, which were much more notable places in the war.

The capture of the somewhat higher Lorette Ridge (a continuation of the Vimy Ridge across the gap at Souchez) in 1915 was one of the finest achievements of the French Army; the position was enormously strong and most stiffly defended. The ridge, with its commanding observation to the north, was held against all counter-attacks until the war was over. The northern portion of the Vimy Ridge, however, which was taken at the same time, could not be held. It was eventually taken by the Canadians in April, 1917, under General Byng (now Lord Byng "of Vimy"), after great preparations, for its possession by the Germans had put us under much disadvantage. Mining operations on a very great scale formed part of the scheme of attack. Plate 46 is a view of one of the largest of the mine craters on the ridge above Neuville St. Vaast, near the elaborate defences known as the "Labyrinth." The well-concealed German gun-emplacements below the ridge (of which Plate 47 shows one of a number at Thelus) had given us great trouble and caused much loss. They were all taken with the ridge, and henceforth the guns from Vimy fired in the opposite direction.

Over the country, _très accidentée_, west of the ridge one might have thought oneself, in 1918, as in some queerly altered part of England. At all the principal road-crossings men in khaki regulated the traffic, everywhere were conspicuous public notices in English, and in the villages the shops exhibited signs such as "Tommy's House," "Entrée libre," or--very frequently--"Eggs and Chips." But driving eastwards through this green and pleasant country and the busy villages one came with startling suddenness and with a drawing of one's breath upon the wilderness. Here, just as north and east of Amiens, villages ceased to be; only disconnected bits of brickwork and general ruin were left, very often not even so much, and nothing but a large painted signboard with a name on it gave any indication whatever of the site of a village. Gardens and fields were all one mass of ragged, chalky shell-holes overgrown with hateful-looking weeds. Trees had disappeared. Only the roads themselves had been engineered into something like decent condition by the levelling up of shell-holes and the clearing away to the sides of brick and timber débris. At a later time the timber had been utilised either for construction or for firing, and the bricks were being systematically cleaned and trimmed and stacked for use in the reconstruction that has been continued since with ever-increasing rapidity.

The villages--Gavrelle and others--on the Valenciennes road east of Arras are practically blotted out, but the towns farther east, which were out of the fighting area, are not much, if at all, damaged structurally. But no doubt the Germans either destroyed or stole all the machinery and industrial appliances they could lay their hands on, in the benevolent desire to ruin French industry for the benefit of their own, for which Lille and Tournai and Roubaix have had to pay so dearly.

From Arras to Lens runs northward the ten miles of straight road, crossing the Vimy Ridge on the way (Plate 48), down which our people must have so often looked on the little town which, until the very end of the war, resisted all attempts of our Allies or of ourselves to enter it. The photograph was taken from outside Lens, looking towards the ridge, which forms the higher ground in the distance.

Lens itself, a prosperous little town having in 1914 some 28,000 inhabitants, in the centre of the French coal-mining district, is one of the many places which, unimportant even within its own country and quite unknown beyond it, has now become a name familiar over the whole world. It was occupied by the Germans in October, 1914, and was almost continually fought for until the British finally entered it four years later. It became eventually the centre of a very narrow salient which covered even its suburbs, but the town itself, drenched with gas and horrible to stay in, held out bravely to the end.

The town is destroyed as thoroughly as Ypres, and more completely than any other place in France. Some idea of the state of Lens early in 1919 is given by Mr. Basil Mott's photograph (Plate 49), taken when it was under snow.

The town is too large to be entirely wiped out, as the villages are, and converted into chalk-pits and shell-holes. But standing on the mound which once was the Church of St. Léger, or on any other point of vantage, one saw in 1919 nothing but a waste of bricks and stones and timber (Plate 50), with no semblance of standing buildings beyond the sheds which had been put up in some space sufficiently cleared to allow of their erection. If one had not seen so much appalling destruction in so many places it would have been unbelievable that a town larger than Bedford or Doncaster should be as entirely turned into small fragments as if some gigantic harrow had been drawn across it.

In 1920 I found that a considerable amount of rebuilding had taken place, although still by far the greater part of the town remained in ruins.

To the west of Lens, northwards and southwards, the whole country is given up to coal-mining. The mines, as everyone knows, were destroyed wantonly, and with great thoroughness, by the Germans. It must be years before they can be working fully again, but the French have not lost much time in taking steps to reinstate them. Even while fighting was still going on a few miles away, I found that in a large colliery near Givenchy (Liévin), where an "Archy" section was at work, and where the whole of the buildings and the pithead work were a mass of ruins, pumping machinery was already at work, and the water pumped up was being utilised in the neighbourhood.

In 1920 a good many of the pits were actually at work, and on the roads one welcomed the familiar sight of miners going to and from their work. The colliery villages (Liévin is nearly as large as Lens) had at first sight a very deceptive appearance of substantiality, but closer inspection showed that what seemed to be uninjured terraces of cottages were nothing much more than bare and roofless walls. Later on one found these ruins being blown up in order to clear the ground, as well as to provide bricks for rebuilding.

General Haig adopted in this neighbourhood, in 1917, a system of feint attacks which he describes as quite successful in their object, although they had the disadvantage that they frequently prevented him from denying German accounts of the bloody repulse of British attacks which in fact had never occurred at all! The most noteworthy of these feint attacks took place near Liévin, as to which he says:--

"On this occasion large numbers of dummy men and some dummy tanks were employed, being raised up at zero hour by pulling ropes. These dummies drew a heavy fire and were shot to pieces. The Germans duly reported that an attack had been annihilated, and that rows of British dead could be seen lying before our lines."[21]

[21] Despatches, p. 101.

From Lens eastwards towards Lille the surface destruction diminishes rapidly. Trees have been cut down (probably in 1918), but cultivation seems to have gone on uninterruptedly--for the benefit of the invader, of course--during the war.

ARRAS CATHEDRAL.

_Ruins which it has been proposed to leave in their present condition, if they will stand, as a memorial of the once too near neighbourhood of the Germans._]

THE VIMY RIDGE.

_This Ridge, between Arras and Lens, is several miles in length, and over 200 feet above the surrounding country. Its possession was therefore of extraordinary value for observation and artillery purposes. We captured it in April, 1917, and the Germans were never able to recover it. The very similar Lorette Ridge, taken earlier by the French, forms a continuation of it some six miles long, towards the north-west._]

A MINE CRATER.

_One of the mine craters blown on the Vimy Ridge as a first step in the attack which captured the Ridge in 1917._]

AT THELUS.

_One of the German gun emplacements on the north of the Vimy Ridge which, being outside our direct observation, made it so important that the Ridge should be taken._]

THE ROAD TO LENS.

_From the Vimy Ridge (seen in the distance in the photograph) our men could look straight along the four miles of road to Lens; but it was eighteen months after the capture of the Ridge that they actually got possession of what was left of the town._]

LENS UNDER SNOW.

_The wilderness that was once Lens, as it appeared early in 1919._]

LENS.

_Later on in 1919 some sheds and temporary buildings were to be seen wherever space had been cleared for their erection. Another visit some months later showed that very much progress had been made in the way of reconstruction, but of course, as a whole, the town is still a mass of ruins._]

VII.--THE SOMME

(PLATES 51 TO 66.)

I have been able to traverse several times since the war the great stretch of country in Picardy which is generally spoken of at home as "the Somme"--country over which much of our hardest fighting took place in 1916 and 1918, and where thousands of our brave men are now lying. We became only too familiar with the names of places within it, which might have peacefully remained for centuries more in the happy oblivion in which they had rested for centuries past, had not the war waves broken upon them and destroyed them while making them immortal. Much of the country had been so completely devastated that there was nothing in it or on it to show in a picture--nothing beyond an irregular expanse of ground broken everywhere into shell-holes and covered over with an untidy wild herbage of rank weeds. But the interest of this country to all of us at home--and "at home" in this case more than ever includes the homes overseas--is so close and so poignant that it is probably worth while to add here some little description of the characteristics of the great area which we call "the Somme," and the positions of the places which we fought over.

In the thirty miles from Amiens to Péronne the Somme runs from east to west in a narrow valley, with eight immense double bends round spurs which project alternately from the higher country (some 200 feet above the river-level) on the north and south. The main road eastwards from Amiens lies south of the river, and rises gradually to the higher level at Villers Bretonneux, about ten miles from the city, and then continues dead straight and nearly level, till it drops again at Brie (twenty-nine miles from Amiens), to the Somme valley, after the river has taken its sharp bend to the south at Péronne, which is four miles north of Brie. As one goes eastwards from Amiens the route becomes more and more war-worn. At first the ordinary avenues of trees still stand, farther on the trees become fewer and fewer, and finally disappear entirely (Plate 51), and a region of total destruction is reached, where only rough indications remain of the sites of the villages.

But in 1919 I found German prisoners at work filling up shell-holes (the French and ourselves did not make prisoners dig front-line trenches), levelling the ground, and clearing up generally, and some reoccupation of land had already started, peasants and "store"-keepers living in such temporary bungalows as they could construct. Somehow or other the owners of different strips of land along the road seemed to have discovered which particular strip belonged to each one, ploughing was already going on, and cultivation had been started in quite a number of places.

The river itself lies always too low down in its valley to be visible from the road, from which the view to the north looks right over to the high ground between the Somme and the Ancre. The Avre, coming from Montdidier and Moreuil in the south, falls into the Somme close to Amiens, and the Ancre, coming from Albert in the north, joins the main river at Corbie, four miles north of Villers Bretonneux.

Albert is about eighteen miles north-east of Amiens by a straight road through Pont Noyelles, which continues to Bapaume, eleven miles farther. On the high ground between the Ancre and the Albert-Bapaume road stood Thiepval and the German redoubts, and on the Bapaume road itself Pozières, Courcelette, and Warlencourt.

In the angle between the Albert-Bapaume road and the northern bank of the Somme every village and every wood became part of a tragic history--Mametz, Contalmaison, Longueval, Guillemont, Combles, with Trones Wood, Delville Wood, and the others. South of the Somme and between the river and the road lie Hamel and Chuignes, while on the main road itself, east of Villers Bretonneux, once stood the villages of Warfusée (Lamotte), Estrées, Villers Carbonnel, and others, while the town of Péronne--protected by Mont St. Quentin on the north and by the Somme and a tributary on the other three sides--lies just at the bend. South of the road and in the triangle between it and the Avre lie the uplands on which, very generally, the French were fighting to the right (south) of the British, and in which the village names are therefore less familiar to us than those farther north.

* * * * *

The first battle of the Somme commenced on the 1st of July, 1916, and lasted, with more or less quiescent intervals, until the late autumn. British and French were fighting side by side--the British on the northern half, from the Upper Ancre to the Albert-Péronne road; the French to their right, facing Péronne, crossing the Somme, and extending southward as far as Chaulnes.

The German defences in the north, which had been under construction for more than a year, were enormously strong, the "first line" alone being a maze of trenches half a mile wide.

Their position stretched southward from below Arras to Gommécourt, and covered Beaumont-Hamel and the heights east of the Ancre valley, crossed the Albert-Bapaume road two miles north of Albert, passed eastwards through Fricourt, crossed the Somme some miles short of Péronne, and then ran southwards west of Chaulnes. The story of the fighting, both French and British, as it can be read even in Lord Haig's official despatches, and still more in the unofficial accounts, is a continuous record of episodes every one of which would have been called Homeric in any other war, but which in this gigantic struggle seem to have become ordinary events. The ordinary civilian of common life from workshop or warehouse or office or studio turned out to be in essence exactly the same being as the noble and adventurous heroes of the stories and histories of our youth. And while he would grumble seriously about his baths or his meat or his shaving facilities, he would yet go into action cheerfully without hesitation, although he knew well enough the horror of his own work and the great chance that he might never return.

The village of Mametz (Plate 53), like nearly all the villages in "the Somme," has disappeared; it was among those taken by the British on the first day of the battle. It was in this attack that East Surrey men are said to have gone forward dribbling footballs, some of which they recovered in German trenches, in front of them.[22]

[22] O'Neill, "History of the War," p. 604.

The French on our right got within a mile or two of Péronne, but its defences were too strong and it was not actually captured until 1918.

Trones Wood (Plate 54) was cleared early in July. Here a small body of 170 men of the Royal West Kents and Queens[23] held out all night, completely surrounded, until relieved the next morning. Delville Wood (Plate 55) was captured the next day. The fighting in these woods has left nothing of them but churned-up ground and a few bare stems, although the rank undergrowth makes some of them appear quite green from a distance. Combles (Plate 56) was not taken until the 26th of September, when the British and French entered the town simultaneously (from the north and the south respectively), and captured a company which had not been able to get clear away in time. The little town is not so entirely wrecked as many other places, but the house which is shown under reconstruction in the photograph is perhaps one of the least damaged.

[23] Haig's Despatches, p. 29.

Thiepval and the redoubts on the Thiepval plateau were not finally secured until November. The Germans had said beforehand that we "would bite granite" in trying to take them. We did bite granite, but our teeth proved the harder.

Along the Albert-Bapaume road the villages of Pozières and Courcelette have disappeared altogether. Sometimes a big iron gate, or half a gate, or a stone gatepost, shows where an entrance once existed to some more or less pretentious mansion, but the building itself has gone entirely, and its site is grown over with rank herbage, which hides every indication even of where the house once stood. The whole Thiepval plateau is now a wilderness of weedy vegetation, and the weeds seem to have swallowed up the redoubts altogether, as well as Thiepval itself.

The defences on the Upper Ancre still barred the way to Bapaume along the road by Le Sars and the Butte de Warlencourt (Plate 57).[24] The Butte was the centre of the German position, as strongly protected by trenches and wire as even the Thiepval plateau itself. Fierce attacks in October and November, 1916, failed to secure it, and the chalky hillock was only finally taken in February, 1917. It now carries five crosses erected in memory of the units which fought there.

[24] This view is taken looking eastwards towards Bapaume, with the Butte on the south side of the road.

The mud, our chief enemy, made active operations impossible for a time. It was an even worse enemy than the Germans. General Haig says[25] that the trenches were channels of deep mud and the roads almost impassable, making all problems of supply most serious. General Maurice calls it, later on, a "morass of stinking mud." We were, in fact, at that time--and at other times as well--fighting the elements as well as the Germans. On the 17th of March, 1917, however (after the Warlencourt Ridge had been carried), Bapaume itself, which had been systematically destroyed by the Germans before they evacuated it, was at last entered.

[25] Despatches, p. 47.

Bapaume in 1919 was, like Albert, being rapidly reinhabited, and the new buildings (perhaps due to their being closer to the main road) were more in evidence than in most other places.

The villages north of Bapaume on the Arras road (Behagnies, Ervillers, and others) are, like those nearer the Somme, practically wiped out. But here, also, peasants and small shopkeepers were returning "home," and sheltering themselves as best they could in some sort of hutments.

On the 17th of March, 1917, also, the Germans having just commenced their great retirement, Mont St. Quentin was taken, and the next day Péronne itself. Plate 58 shows the dry bed of the Nord Canal where the road crosses it just at the rise on the back (north) of Mont St. Quentin. Plate 59 shows the ruin of the Church of St. Jean at Péronne. The little town itself, originally of about 5,000 inhabitants, was in parts systematically burnt and destroyed by mines by the Germans before they evacuated it in 1917, and further damaged by Franco-British shell-fire in 1918. On the spot I was told that the great church had been among the buildings deliberately burnt by the Germans; in any case it is now, like the rest of the town, a mere ruin. The outrages perpetrated by the Germans in their masterly retreat in 1917 extended across the whole area of the retirement (see Plate 119), and have been sufficiently described, so far as it has been possible in any decent paper to describe them. But the burnt and shattered houses were not the matters, bad as they were, which caused the intense feeling of loathing in addition to anger among the French, when they were at last able to return to their desecrated homes.

For a year after March, 1917, the Somme area ceased to be fought over, as the German retirement in 1917 had removed them far to the east. A year later the tables were turned, when on the 21st of March Ludendorff's great attack, cleverly directed against our weakest spot, began to drive us back from St. Quentin towards Amiens, and succeeded so rapidly that on the 23rd the Germans were at Péronne and on the 25th near Estrées, three miles east of the Somme on the Amiens road. On the 25th our Allies, on our right, had been compelled to fall back as far as Noyon. At this critical moment there was got together surely the most remarkable auxiliary force that a British General has ever had under his command. General Haig says:

"As the result of a conference on the 25th of March, a mixed force, including details, stragglers, schools personnel, tunnelling companies, army troops companies, field survey companies, and Canadian and American Engineers, had been got together and organised by General Grant, the Chief Engineer to the Fifth Army."[26]

[26] Haig's Despatches, p. 205.

The line on which this "mixed force" was placed passed through Warfusée (Plate 60). Some of the men collected were Engineer civilians with no previous training, and no knowledge of rifle-shooting. I have been told that they were pronounced most plucky, "but somewhat dangerous"! In the result, however, they did yeoman service in helping to hold back the onslaught until the distant reserves could arrive and until the attackers had eventually exhausted themselves.

On the next day came the historic conference at Doullens, which resulted in the appointment of General Foch in supreme control of the united forces (p. 3). But General Haig found it necessary to withdraw his troops still farther, and the German advance was finally checked only at Warfusée-Ablancourt, some ruins of which appear in Plate 60. The enemy never succeeded in reaching the crest of the high ground from which he could so completely have commanded Amiens (p. 38), although he was able to hold Villers Bretonneux, after a new attack on the 24th of April, for a few hours, after which he was turned out by the Anzacs and never got back. It was in this attack that British tanks met German tanks and beat them.

It was not until the 8th of August, 1918, after Foch had carried on his successful attacks on the Marne Salient for three weeks, that the great counter-attack on the Somme was fully started, although before that day there had been some important gains. Especially had a notable combination of Australians, Americans, and Tanks had a great success on the 4th of July, after a heavy barrage, in capturing Hamel, a village on the Somme just north of Warfusée. Both the Australians and the Tank Corps have given picturesque accounts of this fighting, with a somewhat amusing preference, in each case, for the service with which the writer is connected. It was here that the Australians are credited with having pronounced their new colleagues from across the Atlantic to be "good lads, but too rough"!

Most elaborate (and successful) precautions[27] had been taken to make sure that the attack of the 8th of August (Ludendorff's "black day") should be a surprise. In spite of all these precautions, some anxiety may have been felt by those who knew that a sergeant, who was well acquainted with everything that was on foot, had been taken prisoner by the Germans a few days before. Oddly enough, the minutes of the cross-examination of this N.C.O. were afterwards captured, and it was found that, like a plucky Englishman, he had given nothing whatever away.[28]

[27] See Haig's Despatches, p. 259.

[28] Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, vol. vi., p. 30.

Villers Bretonneux had been throughout in our possession, but only its ruins were standing, the one "hotel" which I found there in 1919 being a tarpaulin-covered shed (Plate 61) calling itself the "Hôtel des Trois Moineaux," and bearing a cryptic message from "Toto" which I am unable to explain. The first day's advance swept far beyond Warfusée, just south of which the village of Marcelcave was captured by a tank whose Lieutenant demanded--and obtained--a receipt from the Australians before he would hand over his spoils to them. Abreast of Foucaucourt (Plate 52) and between it and the Somme lies Chuignes, where the Australian advance captured a 380-mm. gun on an elaborate emplacement, which had been put in position, but I believe too late to be used, for the purpose of a long-range bombardment of Amiens. The gun was dismantled before we reached it, and lies on the ground shorn of some 10 feet of its muzzle end, which had been cut off by its captors to send home as a "souvenir."

The Chipilly spur (Plate 62), north of Warfusée on the north side of the river, caused some heavy fighting, but was taken by the Londoners on the second day of the advance, with the help of two companies of Americans who are said to have lost touch with their own division and to have been quite ready to lend a hand in any fighting that was going on. The photograph gives some idea of the river itself at a place where it is navigable over a great breadth. Cappy (Plate 63) is a little farther upstream, where the river has divided itself into various channels, the particular one seen being the navigable canal, the rest of the river spreading over a quarter of a mile of marsh land to the north bank.

The land beside the Amiens-Péronne road becomes more and more ruined as one goes eastwards. Plate 51 shows something of what the actual road looks like, but no picture can indicate the state of the land itself, the country that was once fertile fields and farms. On my last visit (early in 1920) it was pleasant, but pathetic, to see that many peasants had somehow been able to find out which strip had been theirs before the war, and had built themselves hutments--they could hardly be called houses--in which they could at any rate live beside the land which they loved and which they are trying once more to cultivate. Towards Villers Carbonnel the countryside shows itself as more and more destroyed. Plate 64 (an officially taken photograph) indicates the appearance of that village immediately after we passed through it in 1918 and before the clearing-up work had commenced. A little later the broken woodwork would be collected for firing and the bricks from the fallen walls (if enough were left) would be trimmed and stacked ready for use again in making such dwellings as will anyhow make it possible for the peasants to get back again. In France they do not wait for trade union permissions, or "skilled" labour, or the sanitary (and other) regulations of County Councils, but go straight ahead and build. It seems certainly the best way of getting houses.

General Haig tells us how in March, 1917, when we were trying to keep up with the retreating Germans along this road, the part of it between Villers Carbonnel and the Somme at Brie was almost knee-deep in mud, so that it took the troops sixteen hours to cover the last four and a half miles. The difficulty of this crossing can be well understood by everyone who has seen the breadth and character of the flat marshy ground which, over a great part of the distance from Amiens, represents the bottom of the Somme valley. Some indication of the difficulty of troops crossing the river can be gathered from Plate 65, which is taken from below Cléry, close to the point at which the Australians crossed the river on the 31st of August, 1918, and made the magnificent attack on Mont St. Quentin, which resulted in the capture of Péronne the next day, and earned such warm praise from the Commander-in-Chief.[29]

[29] Haig's Despatches, p. 270.

The Château of Brie (Plate 66) lies on the Somme only half a mile south of the crossing of the main road from Amiens to St. Quentin, and therefore some four miles south of the great bend of the river at Péronne. On the 27th of September, 1918, it was the scene of a wonderful dress rehearsal for the crossing of the Hindenburg Line at the St. Quentin Canal two days later (see p. 58). Rafts, collapsible boats and life-lines, and some of the 3,000 life-belts which had been hurried up from the coast, were all tested, to make sure that there should be neither hesitation nor failure in their use in the attack on the "absolutely impregnable" section. And, as everyone knows, there _was_ neither hesitation nor failure; the St. Quentin Canal was carried by the Terriers on the appointed day, and with this success, and the crossing of the "Kriemhilde" Line by the Americans in the middle of October, the last standing places for the retreating German armies vanished.

On the road east of the Somme from Brie to Péronne one saw a curious phenomenon which I seldom saw elsewhere, and cannot explain. In some way the trees in the felled avenue had been able to reassert their life, and for a considerable distance the road was lined in an unsightly fashion with what looked like gigantic bushes growing out of the stumps of the once tall and beautiful trees.

I have said nothing in this section as to Amiens itself; it had serious enough troubles, although it was never in the fighting zone, having been evacuated by the Germans after only ten days' occupation in September, 1914. That time, however, was sufficient for a requisition of half a million francs to be enforced, and for a number of civilians to be deported.

Some parts of the city, including the railway-station, were seriously damaged by bombing and by heavy shells, and the city suffered much from April to June in 1918. The civilian inhabitants left it early in April. Several shells hit the cathedral, and houses within a few yards of it are entirely wrecked, but happily very little damage was done to the structure itself, from which the stained glass had been safely removed.

THE SOMME ROAD.

_A stretch, close to Villers Carbonnel, of the main road from Amiens towards Brie and Péronne, which lies on the high country above the Somme. What was once the avenue of trees is even here not so entirely destroyed as in many other places._]

FOUCAUCOURT.

_The remains of a church beside the Somme road._]

MAMETZ.

_The village of Mametz has practically disappeared; the immediate foreground covers what had once been cottages; the cottages on the other side have equally disappeared. (The cross is a war memorial.)_]

TRONES WOOD.

_Shell-holes, chalk trenches and bare trunks are all that remain of the wood, the trunks much more numerous than in the Ypres Salient._]

DELVILLE WOOD.

_There is here less than in Trones Wood of chalky holes, everything is thickly covered with rank weeds, but along the roadsides even the stumps of the trees disappear after a short distance._]

COMBLES.

_Remembering the amount of fighting which went on round Combles before the French and the British entered the village simultaneously from opposite sides, there are possibly more buildings left than might have been expected. They are mostly, however, even more damaged than the one which is here being examined by its owner with a view to rebuilding._]

THE BAPAUME ROAD.

_The road from Albert to Bapaume by Le Sars. The chalky mound on the right is the Butte de Warlencourt, the end of the Warlencourt Ridges, which was the scene of some notably plucky fighting in November, 1916._]

MONT ST. QUENTIN.

_A bridge, not entirely destroyed by the Germans, over the dry bed of the Canal du Nord, where its course circles round the rising ground known as Mont St. Quentin, which formed so important a defence for Péronne on the north._]

PÉRONNE.

_The Church of St. Jean at Péronne, according to people on the spot, was deliberately destroyed by the Germans before they were compelled finally to evacuate the town._]

WARFUSÉE (LAMOTTE).

_This little village church, on the Somme road, was just at the cross-roads leading to Hamel in one direction and Marcelcave in the other, both villages having some special interest both for Australians and Americans and for the Tank Corps, in the advance of August, 1918._]

VILLERS BRETONNEUX.

_The village had a notable history as the vantage-point over Amiens which was the special objective of the Germans in March and April, 1918, but which they only succeeded once in holding for twenty-four hours. The Hotel of the Three Sparrows was the only one which I found in 1919._]

THE CHIPILLY SPUR.